Sub Specie Aeternitatis. An Actualisation of Wittgenstein on Ethics and Aesthetics

This article will present an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. In extension, it will inform recent discussions regarding a special kind of nonsensicality, which forms a central part of ethical and aesthetical expressions. Instead of identity between ethics and aesthetics, we should understand the relationship in terms of interdependence. Both attitudes provide a view sub specie aeternitatis and thus permit a view of the world as a whole. Employing the vocabulary of Charles Taylor and Harry Frankfurt, it must be remembered that rather than a neutral view from nowhere, such wholeness arises out of strong evaluations that are made against the backdrop of a constitutive framework of intelligibility. At this point, the epistemic gain of actualizing Wittgenstein will reveal itself: it will put us in a position where it is possible to differentiate between ethical and aesthetical forms of identification that Taylor and Frankfurt neglect. However, in order to actualize Wittgenstein’s ideas, it is necessary to argue that Tractatus should not be understood in a Kantian fashion as suggested by Tilghman for instance

Science, Medicine, and the Aims of Inquiry: A Philosophical Analysis

Amid criticism of medicine's scientific rigor and patient care, this book offers a philosophical examination of the nature and aims of medicine, and new perspectives on how these challenges can be addressed. It offers input for rethinking the agenda of medical research, healthcare delivery, and the education of healthcare personnel

Could Dehumanization Be Perceptual?

A large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to three ideas: (a) dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness, (b) such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms, and (c) whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. This chapter examines (c) and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization might, at least in part, be a perceptual phenomenon, such that dehumanizers visually perceive the dehumanized as exhibiting lesser-than-human minds. It is perhaps unsurprising that the first systematic investigations of dehumanization approached the phenomenon as linked to contexts of war, genocide, extreme hatred, and violence. One guiding hypothesis was that dehumanizers exclude the dehumanized from a moral community of human beings, implicitly conceptualized as displaying distinct individualities and being embedded in caring interpersonal relations. By comprehending the dehumanized as deindividuated entities to which moral norms and considerations of fairness do not apply (Opotow 1990), dehumanizers are able to disengage from moral restrictions and self-sanctions (Bandura 1999)

Scaffolded Minds: Integration and Disintegration

Scaffolded Minds offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. It draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind. The book sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. It introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. It then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits

The continuity of inquiry and normative philosophy of science

This paper aims to contribute to debates about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its relation to science. The starting point is the Discontinuity View (DV), which holds that philosophy is discontinuous with science. Upon critically engaging two lines of argument in favor of DV, the paper presents and defends the Continuity View (CV), according to which philosophy and science are continuous forms of inquiry. The critical engagement sheds light on continuities between philosophical and scientific inquiry while underlining special normative competences of philosophical work. The final part of the paper uses these insights to offer a brief outline of a normative approach to philosophy of science

Norms and practices of polylingual behaviour: a sociolinguistic model

This paper discusses the notion of language in relation to the notion of a language. We argue that the concept of languages as neatly separated, countable units is an ideological construction. This ideological construction served the European nation states well during the Romantic period and later, for instance during Colonialism (e.g. Heller 2007, Makoni and Penny cook 2006). With growing internationalization, however, this concept of languages has become increasingly at odds with the linguistic experience of speakers throughout Europe. In fact the notion of languages, for instance as separable from dialects, has never been accepted by sociolinguistics. Any specific notion of a language, say Dutch, is a sociocultural construction, and it is only real at the level of norms. At the level of language use we can not maintain these concepts of languages. As an alternative idea of language we propose that descriptions and analyses of language use must be based, not on “languages”, but on features, and the focus must be in the individual (Hudson 1996)